


the space emptiness coats

by Catherines_Collections



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Astral Projection, Blood and Injury, Depersonalization, Disslocation, Dissociation, Insomnia, M/M, Memory Loss, POV Second Person, Sharing a Bed, Van Days, love in the soft places
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-14 22:26:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15398856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: You’re getting really tired of being kept alive by your sheer lack of noise.





	the space emptiness coats

**Author's Note:**

> second pov is the god pov & i don't make the rules, sorry. This is incredibly self-indulgent. 
> 
> I own nothing, enjoy.
> 
> Now with an amazing translation by the wonderful @larazireae: https://ficbook.net/readfic/7261144

You blink and you’re in a diner.

You don’t know how you got here, but note how your eyes are drying out from being open too long.

You don’t remember opening them, either.

It’s a game— how you don’t remember entering, how long you’ve been here, or having any previous thoughts about the place.

The level of concern you know you should be feeling has mellowed itself out into your bones. You blink again and try to settle into your surroundings.

The thing is, you should be used to it now.

Late night shows training you in dislocation. Your mind lost to the miles between your parent’s house and the one you left. The way no one wants to stay with you, and how your body’s learned to copy the technique.

Or, well, not used to it exactly, but closer than estranged– familiar, maybe, with the way your mind places itself into a second skin that refuses to sew itself back in. _Adjusted,_ mostly, to how you watch yourself move your body and still not feel any of it.

The surreal bleakness of your newfound surroundings still likes to pound itself against your skull, though.

The movement creates a rhythm and turns a migraine into something capable of high definition, and compatible with background sound– a tune to music just out of reach, kept alive by the bags you can feel darkening below your eyes.

You’re getting really tired of being kept alive by your sheer lack of noise.  
  
There’s an untouched cup of black coffee in front of you. Part of the twenty-four hours diner charm, accompanied by the sign flashing in the liquids murky reflection.

The diner’s nice, but you don’t remember what brought you here. It’s an answer to a riddle you haven’t heard yet. Blink, again, and it feels like gaining back an inch of control even though you can see the other half of your ghost across the room.  
  
“You okay there, honey?”  
  
Two of you look up but one head moves. You’re watching yourself watch the now moderately concerned waitress lean onto her left hip and look you up and down. Your eyes hurt from cataloging your own movements.

The waitress’s lips twist down into frown like she’s not sure what to do about what she’s seeing.  
  
You get it.

You look at the Pete in the diner seat and wonder if he sees anything besides you, right now.  
  
Diner Pete blinks, and it’s a flash between your two bodies- something crashing something giving before you’re two entities tied to one again.

If your past self ever imagined how it would feel existing out your own body, you want go back and tell him _not fun_ . Maybe even dig your nails into his brain, search out your own source of madness before it peaks. Dig around the arrogance and tell him, _you’re going to get a lot you didn’t ask for._

You can already picture yourself at seventeen, too cocky and sure and smiling like it’s all going to be _so funny._ It’s not.

Diner Pete says, “Sorry?” and it’s your voice speaking.

The revelation shouldn’t shock you as much as it does. You know you’re your own body, and that you just exist out of it right now. It happens, maybe more than you’d like to think about.

The shock is still there.

The words come out scratchy like he - _you_ \- hasn’t used his - _your_ \- voice in a while. Diner you reaches for his throat, stops just in time for the waitress to catch it. You tilt your head back and Diner Pete copies. The waitress steps in again.  
  
“You’ve been in here for a few hours. Do you need me to call someone for you?”  
  
You close your eyes, try to imagine what the steam from the coffee feels like on your chin, how rough the vinyl seats feel under your fingernails— take a breath.

You open your eyes and you’re looking at the waitress— back to one angle. One ghost, not dead but still walking. It’s a start.  
  
You try a smile, and it feels cracked before the waitress’s frown deepen, and something dark and crawling starts chanting _runrunrun_ when she steps closer. The plastic on the seats crunch when you claw them.  
  
You shake your head, slow, and it doesn't dislodge a second self in the process. It’s almost funny enough to laugh at, considering it isn’t funny at all.

You wonder what time it is.

“M fine, thanks.”

The words roll of easy when you’re not thinking about them.  
  
The waitress backs down and heads back towards the kitchen, and then you’re laying change on the booth table as you’re crawling out of it.

It feels like the waitress’s eyes bare into your back all the way to the bus station.  
  
Neither of you glance back.

  
.

  
It’s really too late to go home, but you’re too broke to be anywhere else so you head there, anyway.  
  
It’s a few blocks that add up to a few miles, and by the time you’re jiggling your apartment key into the lock the cars on the street have gone from few to none.  
  
Night time's supposed to be exhilarating, but you think you hate it the most. How too often you find yourself prying into early morning hours, still vibrating where everyone else is coming down.  
  
The door gives, and once you’re inside you stuff the keys back into your pocket. The apartment’s ratty but it’s home, clothes and boxes thrown over every available space and still made livable.

It reads _teenage boy_ from a mile away, and you think that maybe you keep it that way to commemorate your too shortly celebrated youth.

You’re not nearly that clever.

You empty your pockets onto the counter and find money in your wallet you don’t remember putting there. You stare at it but nothing comes back, so you stuff it back into your wallet and place it on the counter.

Something shifts behind you, and when you turn there’s a silhouette in the hallway, blurred from what you can make out from the shadows— too short to be Joe.  
  
“Pete?” Patrick whispers, words slurred with sleep and voice cracking through the apartment like lightning that you can feel slipping into your veins.

He sounds as exhausted as you feel.

“What time is it? You just come in?”  
  
Patrick’s words end in a yawn, and you watch his face fall back into a cheap mimic of sleep after it ends. He’s wiping his eyes when you realize you still haven’t answered.  
  
“Sorry,” You say, and find you actually mean it. “Lost track of time.”  
  
Patrick hums and nods his head. He’s had practice at this, at seeing the utter mess of destruction you can be and learning how to reel it in. It’s probably not fair: how you think he’s learning you better than you’ll ever learn yourself.  
  
Patrick stretches, and his sleep shirt rolls up his stomach trying to follow his arms. When he speaks again, his words are muddled with sleep. You really want to mean it when you say you didn’t mean to wake him.  
  
But Patrick doesn't ask, instead says, “Come to bed then, yeah? It’s too fucking early for this.”

You know _this_ doesn’t translate to _you_ but you think it, anyway.  
  
“Late, actually,” you say, tired and still angry, just to know you can. Patrick doesn't play into it.

You take a step forward and he grabs you by the wrist, pulling you towards bed.  
  
You don’t even have to ask whose bed your going to. You spend more time in Patrick’s than your own now, and you’re smart enough not to ask what that means.  
  
Patrick climbs into bed and pats the empty side, eyes already falling close. You crawl into the empty space in front of him and bury your face into the pillows when you feel an arm wrap around your waist.  
  
You close your eyes and lock the diner behind the eyelids, take what you remember from watching yourself watch yourself, and add them to the growing pile of _do not recall!_  
  
Patrick’s breath brushes against the back of your neck, and you know he’s already asleep without having to turn around. You count the spaces in between and don’t think about how he may have tried staying up for you.  
  
You don’t think about how your bedroom door was open when you always keep it closed, or how quick Patrick was to fill the hallway after you came in.  
  
The tingling starts to move under your skin, again. Tries to misplace itself into your bloodstream from where it should be dormant in your head.  
  
You’re running out of patience for how your ghost has learned how to dislodge itself. It’s cheating, really, moving outside of your body without the dying part.  
  
Patrick makes a noise in his sleep, and you lean back into it.  
  
You try to ground yourself, tether to the things around you— how Patrick smells like familiar and home; how warm his body is when it’s packed into yours; how the moonlight peaks through the blinds and shows the hidden blonde in all his red hair.

You don’t know if what your body is doing counts as sleep, but you close your eyes and pretend it might be.

 

.

 

You’re supposed to be playing a gig tonight.

It’s been a week out from the diner— seven days from the last time you actually slept, and you’re starting to feel it weighing down your bones.

You’re somewhere in the heart of downtown, and it would have potential if you could let yourself fall into it. Instead, you shake bad enough during your set to fuck up the chords to the first song, and then the one after.

You don’t remember much after. Just Patrick singing what you couldn’t get right while the audience got bored and started to spread itself thin. Andy behind you on the drums, while Joe didn't look up from his guitar.

When you do come through, you’re in the bar’s bathroom. It reeks of piss and sex, and there’s blood on your hand, a shattered mirror in front of you.  
  
There’s glass covering the floor, and you stare at the hand until you see the split knuckles. Pain edges her way into your vision, slow thumps that make you more aware of your heart rate by the second. You wonder where that rhythm was during your show.  
  
Someone knocks on the bathroom door. You’re still staring at your hand and how it’s bleeding all over the bathroom floor. The blood pools itself into a puddle and you watch it- don’t notice when the door’s opened behind you.

“Jesus, _Pete_.”

Suddenly your field of vision is Patrick.

Patrick concerned; Patrick angry; Patrick taking your hand and urging it under the tap as he turns the water on. Patrick holding it there as the nerve endings begin to flood your senses.

Patrick looks you up and down, and you watch his reflection catalog your split lip and scabbed over knuckles.

Your mind is going a mile a minute, but it’s yours again even if you’re still trying to tune back into it.

Patrick says, “Shit shit, Pete. _Fuck_.” As he wraps paper towels around your fist, throwing some down onto the floor to catch the blood. He’s very considerate, you think. And it’s funny, so you start to laugh.

Patrick doesn’t laugh with you, but you watch his white knuckle grip on the van’s wheel driving back home while Joe narrates a drunken tale of conquest from the back, and don’t exactly blame him when he pours the alcohol over your bloody hand even after you yell at him to stop.

He pushes you into bed, after. Guides you to it like he's not the kid in the situation, and tucks you in before he crawls over. The good part of you hopes you don’t get blood on his sheets. The bad part hopes it stains.

It’s another metaphor for memory you don’t want to dissolve so you push it down when Patrick curls behind you, arm thrown around your waist like he’s afraid you’re going to disappear. You think you might be giving the kid dependency issues like this, but it’s always been your job to break things.

“I’m sorry,” you say, maybe minutes, maybe hours after you’ve finally settled. You’re not sure. Your voice croaks either way.

“For what it’s worth,” you whisper, into the dark like the shadows will keep all your secrets. They've always been shitty at it before. “I’m really sorry ‘Trick.”

Patrick doesn’t say anything behind you, but he doesn’t move away so you curl back into him and count it as forgiveness.   
  
.  
  
  
It’s not your bed when you wake up, but you want to call it that for as often as you find yourself in it.

You feel well rested for once, even after the shitty night before and how it’s reflected in pieces across your hand.

There’s light shining through the blinds directly into your eyes. Blink and blink and count the breaths of the body next to you until you falls back into yours.

Patrick’s a solid presents behind you when you finally notice him, and the hand around your waist has somehow found a way to pull you in tighter.

You turn, slow, and face him. You trace over his features with your eyes until you’re positive they’ve been burned into your memory, and then again just to be sure.

You scan back up from his chin to his eyes and find they’re already open—watching you.

You blink.

Patrick doesn’t take his eyes off you when he reaches for your hand, and you feel him move just enough to intertwine your fingers below the blankets. You don’t know why you’re shaking when his fingers brush the bloody scabbing.

You don’t know why your body does anything it does anymore, but the shaking is what threatens to pull you over the edge. Patrick watches your face and, like he can read your body in ways you’ve never been able to, squeezes your hand.

The shaking doesn’t stop, but it slows into something more manageable. Shivers run up your body, _one, two, three_ times before they stop altogether.

He squeezes your hand again, and nothing in your body implodes.

You’ve seen miracles for less, but never had one yourself. You think you really like it.

Patrick’s eyes are soft around the edges when you meet them, and his lips dip into a small smile when you squeeze back.

Patrick just says, “Okay,” and curls your legs together.

And you didn’t realize you were asking for permission before he gave it, but the word solidifies it for you.

You curl yourself as small as you make yourself, bury your head against his chest, and when he hums you feel yourself vibrate with it.

The humming turns into a continuous feeling that travels all over your skin- tells you where you start and where you drop off, outlines your body until you have the mental map locked down.

You tune yourself to Patrick’s center of movement, and tie your body to the fluctuation of his voice.

You pull the blanket over both your heads and bury yourself in the dark and vibrating and _Patrick_ until your heart start beating along in something like contentment. You count out the rise and fall of his chest and catalog your place in between them.

This time, your body stays where you’ve put it- tied between the breaths of Patrick’s humming.

You close your eyes and think it’s almost enough to convince you it could stay like that.

 

.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and Kudos are much appreciated, and I'm rhymesofblau on tumblr.


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